For the first time here at adminbyaccident.com I will share some information about Windows patching that I hope can shed some light and help people on deciding what to patch and how quickly to patch. Digesting Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday releases is always tricky. The amount of information is overwhelming and since almost every company on […]

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday – April 2020

How to install Mate on FreeBSD 12/13
In this how to install Mate on FreeBSD I’m not going to repeat the same guides you can read elsewhere. If you desire to use FreeBSD as a daily driver desktop, I do encourage you to read and follow the guides from this other guy. The guide you are currently reading can be considered the […]

How to configure Apache HTTP with a TLS reverse proxy backend on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I published a how to guide to configure Apache HTTP as a reverse proxy. On that ocasion I was following what the average guide on the internet does on Linux. A front end server with Apache HTTP on calls a backend server where the real site is sitting. Many backend calls […]

How to set the locale in FreeBSD
The locale is the character set that will be used. And it is very important to match the keyboard you are using. Mind this also matters if you are transferring data to other systems. Different standards as the ASCII, UTF’s and the ISO’s, to name a few, have been put in place through the years […]

The root account
Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]

The firewall
If you don’t know why you need a firewall it’s because you are not very tech savy. Don’t worry. You can discover by yourself why you need one. The router sitting in your house has one installed in it. And please don’t disable that by any mean. You can check why a firewall is important […]

How to install Nagios on FreeBSD
As explained in an introduction article, Nagios is a monitoring software very well established and used in production on many environments. Results are displayed in a web page so it uses a web server to publish them to the user and needs some php code to do so. It is configured through files which happen […]

Lynis or how to quickly audit your system’s security configuration
A colleague of mine pointed me out to Lynis, a system’s configuration audit tool which checks the hardening of any running UNIX or UNIX-like system, including the BSDs. This tool has a built in check list and a set of sane and safe configurations and compares them to the target system. As output we find […]

How to replace a disk on a ZFS mirror pool
It’s happened to me, it’s happened to you, it’s happened more than one million times and it will still happen in the future. You run out of disk space or a disk fails. Nowadays you are using ZFS, and instead of having a fancy RAIDZ, because you still don’t need it, you are using a […]

How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on an HP Proliant server with FreeBSD
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]
